Research Database

This article reexamines the conventional wisdom that commercial banking is in severe decline. A careful reading of the evidence does not support it. True, on-balance sheet assets held by commercial banks have declined as a share of total intermediary assets. But this measure ignores the substantial growth in banks' off-balance sheet activities, in off-shore lending by foreign banks, and in the size of the financial intermediation sector. Adjusted for these considerations, the bank-assets measure shows no clear evidence of secular decline. Neither does an alternative measure, constructed using data from the national income accounts. At most, banking may have suffered a slight loss of market share lately. But this loss is a temporary response to a series of adverse shocks rather than the start of a permanent decline.

This article argues that the poor performance of the U.S. banking industry in the 1980s was due mainly to the risk-taking of the largest banks, which was encouraged by the U.S. government's too-big-to-fail policy. The article documents the recent trend toward riskier bank portfolios and the corresponding decline in bank profitability. A breakdown of the data by location and by asset size reveals that bank problems were concentrated in areas with troubled industries (oil, real estate, and agriculture) and among banks with the largest assets. In a statistical study controlling for location, asset size remains a significant factor in bank performance. The article concludes with a rough quantitative estimate of the cost to the industry of the poor performance of large banks.

We analyze a real business cycle model in which the government optimally chooses public investment and nonmilitary current expenditures, to maximize the welfare of the representative private agent. We characterize the optimal response of endogenous spending to shocks to technology and to military expenditures. Comovements between the components of government spending and other macroeconomic aggregates predicted by the model are compared with the corresponding comovements in the U.S. data. The model captures the qualitative features of the relative volatilities of the components of government spending quite well, but predicts too high correlations between the components of government spending and output.

In this paper, we describe and analyze the basic structure of the applied general equilibrium (AGE) models used to assess the effects of government trade policies. Once we have constructed the basic model, we extend it to cover features such as increasing returns to scale, imperfect competition, and differentiated products, following the AGE modeling trend of the past 10 years. We then compare a static AGE model's predictions with the actual data on how Spain was affected by entering the European Community and find that, when exogenous effects are included, a static AGE model's predictions are fairly accurate.

We describe the postwar U.S. business cycle for the durable and nondurable goods producing sector. The business cycle is characterized by positive comovement of output, employment, and investment across the two sectors. We develop a two sector growth model to explain the observed pattern of comovements, and suggest that intermediate inputs produced by the nondurable goods sector for the durable goods sector play a crucial role.

This article reports the recent progress made by researchers trying to build business cycle models that can reliably reproduce aggregate U.S. time series. The article first describes some features of the U.S. data that the models are meant to reproduce. Then it describes a version of the standard business cycle model, along with the indivisible labor extension of that model, both of which assume that fluctuations in economic activity are caused only by shocks to technology. Finally, it describes a version of recent other extensions which assume that shocks to fiscal variables also contribute to the fluctuations. Adding fiscal shocks to standard business cycle models is shown to significantly improve their ability to mimic some of the data.

This article estimates the benefits of reducing U.S. inflation below its current level when the government simultaneously raises another distortionary tax. Other researchers have suggested that reducing inflation would have fairly large benefits—from 1 to 3 percent of gross domestic product. But that result depends on the unrealistic assumption that the government would replace inflation with a lump-sum tax, one which does not affect people's incentives. If, instead, inflation is replaced with an increase in the labor income tax, then the welfare gains that can be expected from reducing inflation below its current level are much smaller—from one-third to one-half of 1 percent of gross domestic product.

In this paper we study the dynamic behavior of stock returns and volatility in emerging financial markets. In particular, we focus our attention on the following questions:

o Does stock return volatility in emerging markets change over time? If so, are volatility changes predictable?

o How frequent are big surprises in emerging stock markets?

o Is there any relationship between market risk and expected returns?

o Has liberalization affected return volatility in emerging financial markets?

Our findings can be summarized as follows. First, there is strong evidence of predictable time-varying volatility in almost all countries. In general, changes in volatility are highly persistent. Second, a fat-tailed distribution improves the fitting ability of the model. Third, investors are not rewarded for market-wide risk. Finally, we do not find any systematic effect of liberalization on stock market volatility.